Tiny Shelter Resident Rejects Branford Move

With the help of an extension cord providing power to his CPAP machine, Joel Nieves is still living in a tiny shelter on a Rosette Street backyard — two months after the city ordered the power turned off for him and his unhoused neighbors.

In that same time, the Elicker administration has also offered Nieves a new, more permanent place to stay, along with security deposit help.

The problem for Nieves — which has led him to turn down that housing help — is that the replacement apartment is two towns away, in Branford.

Nieves, who is 49, has lived since April in one of six under-100-square-foot pre-fab shelters at Rosette Village Neighborhood, behind the Amistad Catholic Worker House at 203 Rosette St. in the Hill.

Amistad’s Mark and Luz Colville and their neighbors and supporters led the way in erecting those tiny homes last year to provide a place to stay for people displaced from cleared homeless encampments and who otherwise had nowhere else to go.

Nieves and his half-dozen unhoused neighbors have remained in the Rosette shelters even after the city called on UI to turn off the power in July, following the expiration of a 180-day permit allowing electricity to the backyard. (The shelters do not have individual kitchens and bathrooms. As part of a suite of zoning relief granted by the Board of Zoning Appeals in March, the Amistad Catholic Worker House has to make available the main home’s bathroom and kitchen to the backyard residents. Mayor Justin Elicker said this summer he called for the power to be turned off because, with the lapse of the 180-day state permit, the shelters had become ​“illegal dwelling units” and were in violation of the state building code.)

Fast forward to the present, and Nieves now uses an extension cord that brings power from the main Amistad house back out to his tiny shelter, so he can use the machine that aids his sleep apnea, a symptom of his various medical conditions ranging from hypertension to heart health complications.

The rest of the tiny home residents, however, live without electricity, and haven’t been able to use air conditioning units to power through record-high temperatures this summer. Now, the collective anxiously looks to the winter.

Over the course of several recent interviews, including following the latest weekly Friday meeting of the Unhoused Activists Community Team (U‑ACT) at the downtown public library, Nieves explained how the city has offered him an opportunity to move out of the Rosette Street backyard and into an apartment. So far, he has declined to take the city up on that relocation effort.

According to Nieves, on Aug. 12, he was contacted by the city’s Office of Housing and Homelessness Services to help him find a new place to live. On Aug. 14, he arrived at City Hall to fill out paperwork that would get him into permanent housing.

Less than 24 hours later, he received a call with the news that he was matched to housing through BHCare, a community behavioral health clinic that provides wrap-around services for clients struggling with mental health and substance abuse. The offer came with a security deposit covering the first and last month’s rent.

The offer, however, would relocate Nieves to Branford, away from the community that was pivotal in providing support through his bout with homelessness. Nieves claimed that he was not informed that the arrangement would relocate him to Branford, and as a result, has subsequently told the city he doesn’t want to make that move.

“It’s uprooting me out of where I live,” Nieves said. ​“You’re telling me a city like New Haven has no place for me with a disability?”

Before Nieves moved into the Rosette Street backyard in April, he said he was a personal security guard in Bridgeport. He said he was shot during that work, leaving him dangerously injured and traumatized. During the recovery process, he said, he became addicted to Oxycontin and Percocet. After ten months in a rehabilitation center, Nieves became sober, but not without residual PTSD and anxiety issues that plague him to this day.

Wanting to leave Bridgeport, he asked the program to send him to New Haven, where he was dropped off at Varick Memorial AME Zion Church’s warming center on Dixwell Avenue. It was there that Nieves heard about the Rosette Neighborhood Village, and after the warming center closed for the season, he moved into one of the Hill tiny homes, a decision that he said changed his life for the better.

“I tell everyone every single time, Rosette gave me an opportunity to find myself,” Nieves said. ​“My mental health has gotten so much better. I have a support system. I have friends now…I’m not alone anymore.”

Nieves added that due to his physical and mental health issues, his psychiatrist has ordered that he stay in New Haven to maintain his health. And his psychiatrist is not alone in this belief — others in the Rosette Village Neighborhood and Amistad’s Mark Colville view Nieves’s potential relocation to Branford as not only detrimental to his health, but also as a part of the city’s attempt to kick unhoused and low-income people out of New Haven.

“There’s a pattern here that [unhoused people] are not being rehoused in New Haven, which is part of the whole land grab that’s going on in this city,” Colville said. ​“They think not only unhoused people, but low-income people, don’t have a foothold in the city, that we are all movable.”

“One example is not a pattern,” Mayor Elicker replied. ​“What he is saying is just not accurate.”

He pointed to the renovation of 2,000 units across the city, half of which are affordable. He also pointed to the fact that a third of New Haven’s housing stock is affordable, the second highest in Connecticut. In regards to Nieves’ placement, he emphasized Nieves’ special medical needs that made the relocation effort ​“more difficult.”

"I Wanted To Stay In New Haven"

City Community Outreach Worker Shaunette James-Marquis provided a slightly different version of events to the Independent in an email comment for this story.

She said she reached out to Nieves to work with him one-on-one in August to connect him to permanent housing. In this meeting, James-Marquis assessed Nieves’ financial and medical situations and, afterwards, called ​“numerous” New Haven landlords to find housing in the city. She said all of those local landlords stated that their units were occupied or offered units that were outside of Nieves’s financial capabilities.

Eventually, James-Marquis found an apartment in the Briarwood housing complex in Branford that fit Nieves’s needs.

James-Marquis said Nieves was ​“thrilled and appreciative of the Briarwood offer,” with the meeting between them ending with Nieves accepting the offer. He only had two more forms to complete the offer — a homelessness verification letter, which had to be sent through Colville, and a psychological evaluation from Nieves’s psychiatrist.

It was through a letter from Mark Colville that James-Marquis found out that Nieves was turning down the offer.

“When I received the homeless verification letter from Mr. C, which stated that the client was turning down the housing offer, I was taken aback,” James-Marquis wrote over email.

After this, James-Marquis contacted Nieves to confirm that what was written in the letter to be true. Later, she contacted Briarwood management and confirmed that they had been informed that the client had declined the offer.

Nieves, meanwhile, pushed back, telling the Independent this story is ​“not true.” According to Nieves, he had openly expressed to James-Marquis at their meeting that he was ​“uncomfortable” with the relocation to Branford, stating that the suburb is ​“not a town known for being low-income.” He maintains that he did not accept the offer at the conclusion of the meeting, going on to say that his ​“entire world” is in New Haven.

“I told her I wanted to stay in New Haven, and will get the doctors to write a note for her,” Nieves said. ​“They were trying to silence me by sending me to Branford, and now here they go again with the same thing. It’s not right.”

James-Marquis also explained to the Independent that, in her meeting with Nieves, she clarified that the Briarwood unit would be connected to the New Haven bus line. Nieves, however, maintains that he never accepted the offer, noting that riding the bus activates his PTSD and anxiety complications. He also does not have his own car.

Nieves is currently waiting for a letter from his psychologist that will officially state what his psychologist has said already: a move from New Haven would be mentally damaging to Nieves. For now, he will stay at Rosette until he can find a location in the city.

Of the many conflicts between the city and the village, one continuing conflict is whether or not every resident of the village has received direct support from the city. Colville firmly states that the city has not extended help and communication with the collective, adding that Mayor Justin Elicker hasn’t even visited the community. Elicker refutes the former’s claim, saying that the ​“track record is clear” on how the city has offered help to every member of the collective.

“We are not always able to have the perfect choice, but the choice that meets our needs and the choice that was available for housing at the time was at Branford,” Elicker said.

In response to the claim that he hasn’t visited Rosette Village, Elicker doesn’t ​“doubt that there is a feeling of community at the site” but sees ​“no purpose” in visiting the site as doing so would not ​“change the law.”

Colville, alongside the rest of the residents at Rosette Village, remains unconvinced.

“[The city is] going to try to push this narrative that we are just refusing services, that when you get offered an apartment, you’re just supposed to take it, no matter where it is,” Colville said. ​“And if you don’t, then you’re somehow resisting being helped.”